


book of hours

by betony



Category: Sorcery of Thorns - Margaret Rogerson
Genre: Found Family, Multi, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:08:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21896416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betony/pseuds/betony
Summary: Elisabeth creates a grimoire. Nathaniel and Silas help.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 69
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	book of hours

**Author's Note:**

  * For [illumynare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/illumynare/gifts).



The first thing that had changed, Nathaniel announced with a grin, was that by rights they really ought to call it House Thorn no longer. “Which means, in turn, that we can finally dispose of all those dreadful decorative thorns worked onto everything. I, for one, welcome the advent of House Scrivener.”

Silas raised an eyebrow. “Shall I go out and purchase a selection of ornamental inkpots instead, master?”

“Be quiet, both of you,” said Elisabeth, face warm, and they obeyed, even if Nathaniel’s eyes still sparkled with laughter and Silas’s expression stayed a hair too inexpressive to be genuine. But the fact remained, she thought later, that there was some truth to it. She had lit the candles, she had offered her blood, she had summoned Silas back again. The silver lock of hair she was careful to trim every week said as much. It was only—she still didn’t know—

(“I am your devoted servant, and Master Thorn’s,” he had said as he knelt and kissed her palm, and nothing else. She had still felt a promise of some sort move between them, but not anything as disconcerting as before. Instead it felt only like a whisper, a waiting for tomorrow, and at the time, she had been too overjoyed to care any more.)

Nathaniel’s arrival in the parlor she had claimed as her personal study, interrupted her thoughts. “Come along, menace,” he called, dark hair dusted with snowflakes. “It’s time for your next skating lesson. We’ll have you skilled with blade in hand and foot both before you know.”

Elisabeth rose to her feet, shaking her unease aside. Silas’s price would make itself known soon enough, and there was no sense worrying about it otherwise. She would go downstairs arm in arm with Nathaniel, and amble down to the river alongside the other courting couples of Brassbridge, and, when she returned, frozen to the bone, she would know that Silas and his exquisite soup were waiting for them. That was more than enough.

* * *

“What are you doing?” Nathaniel asked, peering over her shoulder. He was quick and quiet enough that she hardly heard his approach these days, even with the cane he still used. 

Elisabeth took a minute to finish the last few stitches before leaning back to examine her work with a frown. “Binding,” she said shortly. As an apprentice, she’d been trained in mending books, but creating one from nothing proved to be far more complicated. At first it had been nothing more than a restless impulse, but one that lingered even through her lack of proper tools, forcing her to use Demonslayer’s hilt in place of a bonefolder. Now, at the end of three weeks, she had finally managed a prototype that pleased her. It was not until she had looked down and realized she’d worked the cover in a light blue silk exactly the colors that her assistant librarian robes had been that she knew what her hands were trying to tell her: she might not yet be ready to decide that she wanted to spend her remaining years a warden, but that did not mean her life would be free of books. 

Nathaniel didn’t seem offended by her answer, or lack thereof. Perhaps even ex-sorcerers we’re accustomed to such things, or he had—startling thought!—adapted to the patterns and needs of her day as she had his. Another change, then, to consider. Either way, he only leaned his head down so that their cheeks touched, resting there for a long moment before he said, “What will you put in it?”

Elisabeth thought, and found she had never considered the question before. “I’m not sure,” she replied at last. “Everything, I suppose.”

* * *

 _Everything_ turned out to begin with the account of poor Aldous Prendergast, his betrayal by Cornelius Ashcroft, and his lonely defiance for centuries. In the Collegium’s defense, Elisabeth could see the wisdom of keeping such information private, but it seemed a terrible fate to imagine the truth lost along with his consciousness. It was not precisely what a librarian would have believed, but then again, she was not entirely a librarian anymore. She was a Child of the Library, and wanted to believe that the truth could always be found somewhere between its walls, even if contained only in a single book. 

The problem was that even with the most detail she could provide, Elisabeth’s history took up no more than the first third of the pages in the book she had created, leaving the rest frustratingly blank. She tried at first to supplement it with listings of the classes of grimoires, then those rules about navigating the library that she wished someone had taught her as a child, then a list of obscure and interesting facts Katrien had unearthed for her, and still the number of pages remaining unmarked never seemed to change. 

“Mistress,” said Silas, appearing at her shoulder with tea. A third change the summoning had brought about; Elisabeth still faintly missed being _Miss Scrivener._ She had to comfort herself with the fact that, as always, he had brought the tea himself instead of sending Mercy up. Silas approved of Mercy far more than anyone had expected him to, but she suspected he liked the excuse to visit.

“I haven’t enough to say,” she told him, opening up the book to show him its empty pages. Silas glanced at her sidelong.

“There’s always enough,” he replied. “You’ll find it eventually.”

* * *

Elisabeth wrote. She wrote about Director Ward and his foolish pride and efforts to protect Harrows even as he died. She wrote about Deputy Director Wick and her uncanny grace. She wrote about Irena, all she knew and all she did not.

“Is there any reason in particular,” Nathaniel wanted to know, “why you seem to have sketched a potato in the middle of your book?”

Elisabeth set down her pen, appalled. “It’s meant to be a booklouse.”

Nathaniel laughed a full five minutes, longer and lighter than she would have imagined him doing when they’d first met, before he wiped his streaming eyes and took the pen from her. “Please, my darling,” he said, “allow me.”

It seemed the care Nathaniel had taken in his illusions translated well to artistic ability of other sorts, and Elisabeth had to admit his booklouse looked closer to the real thing than hers ever had. He didn’t stop there. He flipped through the previous pages and added other sketches: curlicues and cats in the margins, Ashcroft’s wretched cane, Irena’s lovely face. 

“I seem to have stumbled into a new profession,” he announced, looking put-upon. “Doubtless you’ll find me peddling tawdry etchings on the street by the end of the week.” Despite his words, his face shone with pleasure, even as his fingertips grew as inkstained as her own. 

The sea of white pages receded.

* * *

“Begging your pardon, Miss,” said Mercy, “but it wouldn’t be wrong to note down some of Himself’s,” that being her half-affectionate, half-annoyed name for Silas, “recipes. Those he’s willing to share, that is.” 

Personally Elisabeth doubted there would be a great number of those, but for Mercy’s sake, she prepared herself to ask anyway. The state of peace in the kitchens was new and tenuous, Silas having decided he liked having a taste-tester permanently at hand and Mercy conceding that Silas spared her all the really difficult or dull tasks of the household. Elisabeth doubted reminding her of how difficult Silas could be would do any good.

Surprisingly Silas warmed to the idea. Not his specialties, of course, but those dishes Nathaniel, Elisabeth, and even Mercy requested most often he allowed to be recorded. As he dictated directions, Silas interspersed them with tales of Thorns past. Elisabeth learned that Rosemary Thorn had been terrified of heights, Nicolas Thorn had kept earthworms in his bedroom, and Arabella Thorn had taught Silas to play the harpsichord and waltz. She heard of plucky Charlotte Tarrant, who charmed her way into Hemlock Drive on a dare from her friends to steal a trinket from a sorcerer’s house, and ended up stealing Alistair Thorn’s heart instead. 

“So you see,” Nathaniel added, making her jump, “that we Thorns come by our affections honestly. All it takes is the slightest mention of an unwise bet, and our pulse quickens.”

“Hush,” said Elisabeth, without rancor. She found herself smiling even before Nathaniel bent to kiss her where she sat at the kitchen table.

“I thought,” he said, “we might add a section on the moss folk.”

Elisabeth half-wanted to refuse, the memory of the _Book’s_ straining heart, of Baltasar’s betrayal of those gentle souls too terrible to forget. But it was the truth she wanted to record, both the bad and good of the Thorns, of the Library, and of the world. Instead she only wrinkled her nose at him and asked: “ _We?_ ”

His grin widened; his gray eyes danced down at her. “We.”

* * *

The halls of the manor no longer dripped blood, but that did not mean its master no longer suffered from nightmares. These days, when Nathaniel woke screaming, he was never alone. Elisabeth’s eyes would flutter open as soon as his body stiffened beside hers, no matter how deep a sleep she was in. By the time Silas entered, she would have sat up in bed, reaching for one of his hands. Only when Silas took the other one, though, would she dare smooth the damp hair back from Nathaniel’s forehead and whisper. “They were all right, in the end. You saw them. Don’t you remember? They were there, and they were well.”

Nathaniel might not reply, but she could feel his jaw clenching, his mind doing its best to replace his childhood memories with the illusion the Library had given him. Some nights it worked, and he went back to sleep; some nights it didn’t, and they stayed up with him until the dawn.

Tonight was a good night, so much so that when Silas soundlessly slipped from the room, Elisabeth followed him. 

He gave no sign of being aware of her presence, but when she sat down in the kitchens, just like that first time, he did not seem surprised at all.

“What happened,” she said without preamble, “when the Archon faced you? What did he take from you?”

(When she’d summoned him, his face had been gaunt, his eyes hollow, his wrists so thin she thought she might have easily snapped them. But there had been none of the blood she had dreaded, no mutilated or missing limbs, and she’d wondered—)

Silas sighed. “The Otherworld is a wondrous place,” he said at last. “Not for your kind, but for ours. It is more beautiful than you can imagine. For most of us, the hunger for human life is the only thing that tempts us away.”

Elisabeth thought of her unkept, unknown promise and tried her best not to shiver. 

Silas, as usual, continued mercilessly on. “If there were a way we could have both at once—our world accessible and our hunger sated—we would. How we would.”

Ashcroft’s plan and the Archon’s intentions would have done just that, Elisabeth realized. And still Silas had fought to stop it. He must read some of her surprise in her face. 

“Exile from the Otherworld until the end of my existence was the Archon’s judgment,” he said flatly. “I will never go home again.”

Elisabeth hugged her nightgown-clad knees to her chest and thought what best to say. “Not true,” she decided finally. “You’re home _now._ ”

Against all expectations, Silas did not contradict her.

* * *

At last the day came when she reached the final page. This proved to be the hardest to fill. She could not think what else anyone might want to read or know, only a vague sense that there was a dizzying amount of it still waiting to be discovered in the world. The thought cheered her. 

Finally Nathaniel tired of her fretting and took the book away. 

“What mattered most?” he asked. “Not to anyone else. To you.”

Elisabeth thought. Eventually she whispered to him what she meant him to illustrate while she wrote beneath. When they were done, she still wasn’t sure if it had been the right thing to do or not, only that it had been what she most wanted to remember.   
  
She was confident that nothing mattered more than that, the last and most inexplicable change of all. 

When she presented Silas with her completed work, he flicked immediately to the end, as she had known he would. He smiled, though, at what he found: the grimoires of the Royal Library, heroes of the battle, hovering just before the void, and below Elisabeth’s notes about their songs under starlight. 

“There is life in this,” he said gravely, and ran a long white finger down the spine. “Life enough for me.”

Her palm tingled with the assurance of a promise fulfilled. 

**Author's Note:**

> This was such a darling book, with an excellent and fic-inspiring conclusion, I couldn’t help but write this treat. I hope you enjoy, and happy Yuletide!


End file.
